The excerpts don`t go into detail about kissing lessons but I assume he`s talking about what Clark and Vivian and Cary and Ingrid were doing up there on the silver screen. And balconies were where serious spooners went to practice those lessons.

Having been hardly serious at all, what I remember best about the balcony is the pain.

Few aches are as excruciating as the ache in a shoulder attached to an arm that has been draped lechetatively -- that`s half lecherously, half tentatively -- across the back of a theater seat for two hours.

UNDER 30S HAVE ANOTHER HANDICAP

Even now, when I hear somebody say you ``have to play with pain`` I don`t think about Bob Baumhower or Walter Payton. I think about the balcony of the Olympia theater in Miami.

Whenever I look at a movie ad, which is about once a month, I feel just as sorry for everybody under 30, as well as 20. What must it be like, growing up without Akim Tamiroff?

Hardly anybody remembers Akim until I mention his role in For Whom the Bell Tolls. He was the guy slouching in the corner, warning the swashbuckling Pilar, ``Woman, don`t provoke.``

He was scared to death of Pilar, but his sullen growl was an inspiration to the henpecked.

He was in a thousand other films but, with all due respect, the balcony probably was a bigger loss than Akim.

People under 30 have another handicap. They don`t have any movie milestones to talk about. .

I like to say that I saw the first technicolor film ever made, namely the Trail of the Lonesome Pine. Maybe it wasn`t the first, but so far nobody has ever challenged me.

I was there when the baldest actor of all time, Leon Errol, became the first man ever to light up the screen with his scalp. It was rated at 350 candlepower, a world record. Yul Brynner was ineligible. He doctored his head.

I was there when Cinamascope was born and sat in on the first feeble appearance of 3-D. I saw the newsreels, the March of Time and Fu Manchu serials die. I heard Bobby Breen`s voice change.

A SHABBY GROUP OF MILESTONES

What changes have the under-30s seen? Candy bars on the installment plan. The extinction of the usher. The death of the double feature. What a shabby group of milestones.

With television and video cassettes burying them under an avalanche of nothing movies featuring no-name actors, youngsters under 20 have had no chance to sort out winners and losers.

The first movie I ever hated was A Tale of Two Cities. I was 7 years old. If you`re under 20, you`ve been subjected to so much trash there`s no way to make a movie so bad you`d hate it.

The first actor I ever hated was Freddie Bartholomew, a little sissy dressed in lace.

Look at the credits in any movie ad today. What names do you see? Bobcat Goldthwait. Thalmus Rasulata. River Phoenix. Are any of them ever in a second movie? It`s hard to hate phantoms.

The first film I was willing to sit through twice was Northwest Passage, starring Spencer Tracy. No military man, before or since, has had an aide with a name as melodic as Konkapot.

My first movie girlfriend was Paulette Goddard. I threw her over for Jeanne Crain, then played the field. Susan Hayward. Rhonda Fleming. Joan Caulfield.